1. Digital Downloads are worth nothing.

On iTunes a single is worth £0.79.

However, the value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it. Music purchased from iTunes cannot be sold, cannot be transferred. It immediately becomes valueless. Thus second hand digital music is worth £0.00. Hardly a great investment.

I know some people who would never buy a new car – And I quote.. “It becomes worth 10% less than I paid for it as soon as I drive it out of the showroom.” – Yet they are happy to spend hundreds of pounds a year on iTunes. Music which loses 100% of its value as soon as it hits their computer. Seems a bit silly really.

2. CD’s are better value for money!

A CD retains it’s value. You can physically touch it, you can sell it on if you get bored of it.

Lets look at a real world example. Coheed and Cambria ::  ‘Year of the Black Rainbow’

iTunes: £7.99.(digital)
Play.com: £7.99. (CD) – http://bit.ly/a8Dyv9

They cost the same! Despite the extra costs to get the raw materials, create the CD, package it, post it etc. Furthermore you get more with the CD. You get a ‘Making Of’ DVD and the lyric sheet along with the same tracks found on iTunes.

If you look closely at Steve Jobs when he is using iTunes I am sure you can see ‘$$$’ appear in his eyes.

3. There are better alternatives

For older music, more often than not, a CD is usually cheaper than the digital copy. For listening purposes, if you are staying at home you might as well use a free service such as Spotify. Even paying £10 a month for Spotify presents better value for money than iTunes. It has the same drawbacks, you cannot sell / transfer music and yet it has the advantage of opening up a library of (probably) millions of tracks.

Over to you

What do you make of legal digital downloads? A big swindle or the future of the music industry?

I am looking to set up a small 2 man web agency. I have been analysing the local competition in the area in which I plan to start up. A big part of my plan is to own a decent share of the local market and there will be local advertising to facilitate this. It was therefore cruicial to make sure that there aren’t too many people doing what I want to do.

In looking carefully at my target area I identified 61 web designers. I used Google maps for this. What followed was painstaking clicking and reading. From the 61 developers I found at the following…

There was only 1 direct competitor. The 5 top end companies were small -> medium agencies that specialised in working with brands or the public sector. This is the long term goal so they wouldn’t come into play until at least year 3. The indirect competitors were SEO specialists or Flash people. My agency will do these things but only as part of bigger projects. If anything these indirect competitors are more likely to become outside contractors.

19 people were rocking a 90′s special website or something worse. 17 websites were miscategorised. These were mainly directories or computer repair companies. Oddly there was also a kabab shop there.  14 were inactive. This means either their site was down or they were no longer taking on clients due to new commitments.

What does this mean?

There will always be a lot of competition, as a result establishing ourselves locally will be important in the first year. The lack of people in the local area providing similar services proves potential for what we plan to provide. Partner this with the 27,000 VAT paying businesses in the local area…  the goal of 30 clients in year 1 seems very achievable.

Difficulties

One of the difficulties I found was trying to work out the potential demand for web design in the local area. This is something that I should probably prove before I attempt to get some funding however I am finding it a bit tricky.

The council is pretty useful and tells me the number of VAT paying companies along with the sector each company is in. In my target area there are a significant number of businesses in most sectors. Ideally I need a footman to go around and do some market research. Maybe pay someone to do a survey. This is a last resort.

Just as effective would be to determine the % of companies that had a website 1/2/3/4/5 years ago and what percentage have a website now. Proving a forward trend proves the market.

One last thing

Before jumping into something you need to know the strength of the area in which you are participating. For this I will be using the http://www.alistapart.com/ survey’s to make some comparisons and try to establish some trends. On this note the 2009 survey results are really overdue.

Next

Once I have finished my research I will fully define the services that we are planning to offer. After this I will be looking into the most cost-effective methods to advertise and spread the word. I also need to create a brand which should be interesting. Anyone… one thing at a time.

I will be in touch soon with another update.

1) I do not want strangers to know my precise location at any given point. This is mainly down to security and trying to limit the already obscure risk of burglary when I am out. Perhaps also to limit the even more obscure risk of being abducted on my daily stroll. (Do you see what I mean about sounding paranoid?)

2) I do not want people to be able to see pictures of me. Well, not exactly. The problem is that images often do not carry a context, furthermore you often have very little control over what images other people post. For example. I would like to try restrict the publication of the odd drunken picture. Such pictures spread around friends are fun, such pictures spread around strangers is just plain creepy.

3) I would like to keep most of my private life private.

The problem with Facebook is that the default settings are a bit iffy. The main two which raise an eyebrow are.

a) Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications And Websites -> What your friends can share about you.

By default this was set as pretty much everything. Ok so I have been ignoring the prompt to make my account more private for about 6 months but still… most of this information doesn’t matter however being able to share photos / videos / status updates and family information… that potentially might not bode well. Considering how I only talk to maybe a fifth of my Facebook ‘friends’ I unticked everything. I just see no reason why friends need to share any information about me.

b) Account -> Privacy Settings -> Applications And Websites -> Instant Personalization Pilot Program

This horrible invention allows ‘partner’ websites to detect facebook users and personalise their websites based on the information they receive about you. Sorry… but no thanks. I think this is really horrible and is the complete opposite of point 3 above. While this is only a pilot program at the moment, it seems that the idea is to expand it. As a programmer it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to harvest the facebook details of visitors..

Friends of Friends

The only other thing I did was make most of my data invisible to friends of friends. As I said above, the majority of ‘Friends’ on Facebook are not actual friends. Thus… 95% of ‘friends of friends’ are strangers. I came to the conclusion that if I do not want strangers to view something I probably do not want friends of friends viewing it either.

Concluding

Facebook for networking is awesome. People who spend hours playing Farmville or doing one of the millions of pointless questionnaires may want to reassess some of their life choices.. however, each to their own. It is just important to remember that to make use of 95% of Facebook’s features you really do not need to share tonnes of information about yourself. I would advise everyone to spend 5 minutes running through their privacy settings to ensure they are happy with what is being shared about them.

Over the coming weeks I will be creating a new business plan, I will talk you through my research along with what I am aiming to do. I will be as transparent as possible but there will need to be some things that I will need to omit to keep a competitive edge.

I will also require some funding and I will let you know how my quest goes to get that.

According to my business book I need to start with research. This is where I will begin and I will update the blog shortly with how that has gone.

In the meantime I would just like to take a moment to complain about how many good domain names are being camped by a shocking website which hasn’t been updated in 3/4/5 years… it would be great if people could release domain names that they are no longer using. Registering a domain for the duration of a project instead of the life of the person would – in my opinion – be a big step forwards on the web.

Labour

Labour have had 13 years in power. I actually think Brown is alright. I do not mind ‘the bigoted woman’ remark. He was obviously frustrated and said something in the heat of the moment. It’s nice to see he is human.

However I can’t help but feel that the Labour party has had their time. Looking at their manifesto I see very little that is new and a lot of ‘more of the same.’ I think it is too late for this. Labour have made commitments like counting immigrants out of the country… why didn’t they do this 12/11/10/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1 years ago. Labour has done a lot of good things while in power. However, they just seem to have run out of ideas. This is why I will not be voting for Labour.

Tories

The one thing I like about the Tories is their promise for a new budget when they get into power. This is a great idea especially considering how the Government hasn’t done a spending review recently and the last budget was more about a political speech than about numbers.

However, I am genuinely worried about the Tories being in power. Look at their actions in the past 5 years.  They promised to match Labours spending commitments year on year. When things went wrong they attacked Labour for not saving… it would have been no different if the Tories were in power. You then have banks, when they started going under, at every turn the Tories made the wrong choice. If the Tories had been in power we would have been buggered. After all it was Brown and his ideas which was the model that the rest of the world adopted.

I then have my local MP. I e-mailed all of the ‘big 3′ candidates. Grant Shapps was the only one who didn’t respond. If he cannot take the time to listen to me now, what hope is there that he will in future? Grant has got back to me with some nice responses. Only candidate not to bash the other parties. Thats a +1 for him.

Finally who the hell are the Tories. Apart from Cameron who are you voting in? I can name 4 Tories. Cameron, Hague, Clarke and Osborne. I can name more Liberals and they are the Lib Dems! No one knows who the Lib Dems are!

Lib Dems

A new politics! A bright future! Well no, lets not get carried away. Nick Clegg has been the biggest winner this year but he also has a number of marks against his name. He continues to attack the ‘Ashcroft funded’ Tories despite having a number of dodgy party sponsors himself. He talks about fairness, yet when queried on iffy campaign tactics by one of his candidates he sidesteps the question and tows the party line. For the past week he has said nothing new which has been a little boring.

However, you need to compare him to the other 2. The Lib Dems are actually thinking outside the box. Raising the possibility of scrapping a £100B weapon we can never use… it’s a good thing! The fact that Labour + Tories won’t even raise it for discussion is very worrying. Having a policy which actually deal’s with immigration.. sure, it might need fine tuning but it is a new idea! A workable policy! Redistributing wealth to remove the tax burden on the poorly paid… reforming the voting system… it’s all good stuff.

Perhaps most importantly is the cuts. The Lib Dems by far have the most costed review on spending.  They talk about the cuts they are going to make and the tax raises they want to do. They come up short on what is required but far less short than the Conservatives and Labour.

Closing

Lib Dems need an act of God to get an outright majority. However a vote for the liberals isn’t a wasted vote. It is the only way to inject some fresh ideas into politics. The Tories say a vote for the Lib Dems is a vote for Brown. Perhaps they are right… However Labour would only get in with Liberal support and the Liberals would only give that support if Labour seriously adopted a number of Liberal policies.

The country needs new policies and a new direction. Only a vote for Liberals will bring this.

Now, this obviously led to some frustrations. The Internet is both wonderful and crap. The crap I did not miss. The wonderful-ness… or Google as many know it..  I did miss. On the first day I had a problem. What should I do in Portugal? If I had my laptop I would have done a search ‘<my location> tourism/attractions/days out/etc’. This would have taken a moment. I could have looked at scale maps, got reviews, planned travel and got opening hours instantly.

The second use was for medical reasons, my brother, despite warnings got hideously burnt on the first day. I would have loved to Google it and see what it threw up. There has got to me more than ‘apply after sun.’

What I had at my disposal instead of the internet a holiday rep, a barmaid at the local bar and a freemap. This ‘freemap’ was a non-scale map with various locations dotted on it. I do not have a car so what looks like 5 minutes on a non-scale map could be a 2 hour walk. While this was initially slow, I did find a novelty in it. It made my holiday a far more personalised experience. Take travel for example, our local bar had a travel service when we purchased food. We would show up. Ask for the usual, then get a ride to where ever we wanted. If I had a laptop I would have found the cheapest taxi and had a very annoymous travelling experience. Instead we were chatting to English drivers and had a great holiday.

The same can be said about many other things. Local shops, which I would have avoided if I knew where the local supermarket was, were filled with friendly and talkative people.

If I had the Internet I would have gone straight to the biggest beach, my local map didn’t cover the large beaches and instead I had a great opportunity to discover what can only be discribed as micro beaches. Each one had a single restaurant which some how survived off of the tiny flow of visitors. I would have usually overlooked these and instead found the first sun lounger in the nearest large town.

For all the wonder’s of technology, I can’t help but feel that it can rob you of memories. You become programmed to look for the most efficient way to get around. To try to pack your holiday with everything that you can do. However, often it is just far better to land and talk to those around you. Find out what is worth doing and just stumble onto things. I will definately be going travelling without technology on my next holiday and holidays to come.

Origins

I have been a member of a variety of forums over the past few years and quite a few people have me on their list of contacts. I first heard about this project by someone asking me if I was interested in working on a project. I never commit to anything immediately and instead sought some more information.

The project was to create a music site for unsigned bands. We would showcase their music, allow them to market their music, create and sell merchandise and generally build up a fan base. I thought this had some potential, especially if marketed correctly so I agreed to come on board.

The Problems

There were a number of problems to begin with. The person who came up with the idea had contacted a lot of people through various instant messengers. Some were simply not up to task. I do not mind working in a large team of skilled people but there is little point in working within a team largely unskilled. To better understand this, their are professionals, hobbiests and people who know a bit of HTML and call themselves a designer. We had quite a few of the latter. In a long e-mail I explained why the project would be better off without these people and the first problem was solved. Our team of 11 dropped to a skilled team of 4.

The second problem was the brief. We all had grand ideas and the brief grew very big. It was a massive list of wants. This was one of the problems that we struggled and ultimately didn’t solve. We didn’t want to scrap any features as they were all good. At the same time we knew version 1.0 couldn’t have all of these features. Half would have been a good achievement. As we never all agreed on a 1.o brief there was no defined end point and this was a problem.

The third problem and by far the biggest was the lack of management.  If you want to get a side project done you cannot treat it like a side project. You need to set time aside each day to work on it. This will ensure the project gets the proper attention it deserves and actually gets done. This philosophy didn’t exist in the beginning and the general consensus was ‘if we say we will do it, it will eventually get done’. The person in charge did not set goals, instead he set vague aims and kept pointing towards the launch date. If a person has 4 months to do something where is the urgency? The lack of management also meant some poorly scheduled and controlled meetings which lead to half our time waiting for everyone to attend and the rest of our time getting off track and everyone leaving none the wiser.

I did eventually solve this management problem but it was probably a little too late. I took over the project. I set a weekly meeting time. With each meeting I listed the things we needed to resolve in advance so everyone came prepared. I set everyone a task with a deadline. These tasks were just small sections of programming and design that needed to be done. Slowly the project started to grind into action.

Then it failed. The final nail in the coffin was a lack of motivation by 2 team members. There is a very big difference between wanting to do something, saying you will do something and actually doing it. They talked a good game and there were a lot of promises but when week after week they had nothing to show it got a bit tiring and leached the motivation of other team members. This was ultimately the reason why the project failed.

Lessons

The lessons learnt are as follow.

1. Creating an ultimate feature list is fine but the most important thing is to create an achievable v1.0 feature list.
2. Make sure you have the right team together, if someone isn’t up to it, let them go. It will be better in the long run.
3. If someone cannot manage very well, spot it immediately then help or take over. A successful project is a well managed one.
4. Ensure that everyone knows that while the project is built in their own time, they need to set time aside each day to work on it. If they cannot agree to this then you are going to have problems.
5. From day one look at creating a very limited Alpha. You then will have something to show for the hours invested.

I haven’t been put off working on projects and I hope to work on some more this year.

If you have been working on any projects that haven’t quite panned out feel free to post why.

Before setting goals I think it is important to ask why I am doing it. The new year is a great marker, its an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, reflect on the previous year and give your life a kick in a slightly different direction. Time flies and it is easy to get consumed by the small day to day emergencies and lose sight of the big picture. Each new year I zoom out slightly, survey the landscape ahead and think about the following 3 questions.

1. Am I happy where I am now or is there somewhere I would rather be?
2. Is there anything that I should be doing but am not?
3. Is there anything that I would like to achieve this year which I need to plan for.

The answers to these questions usually define my goals. These goals then become things that I try to tackle throughout the year. These are the things I have come up with. (All goals are techie based, I have separate personal goals such as go to a music festival, sky dive and perhaps finally propose to my girlfriend on a separate list.)

Release Software:

In Q1 of this year I would like to release some software. I have been working on a framework for a little while now and I would like to make this freely available. It is easy to extend and a great starting point for small projects or for people looking to build their own. It is reaching the point where I am building a website with it, locating niggles, adding missing functionality and rewriting core code every other day.

I simply feel it is time that my name went on something open source and freely available. I feel that late Q1 / early Q2 is a realistic and achievable release date.

Publish Blog Posts on other websites:

This was a goal in the final part of 2009 but I didn’t get round to it. In 2010 I am setting the rather lofty goal of writing 12 posts. That is one a month. I do not expect this to be difficult, it simply requires a small amount of organisation to find time to work on these posts. These posts should be a step toward defining myself as knowledgeable in certain web related fields.

Redo Stanley Web Design

Stanley Web Design is nice but it is a year old and has a few small things which are bugging me. I will be creating something simple which better carries the brand message and is easier to extend than my current website. I hope to have this launched in the first half of the year. I plan to build the website with the framework mentioned above. With these working in tandem I expect them both to be completed around the same time.

Improve my blog

I do not mind if someone reads what I write or not. I blog so I can keep a written record of what I was doing or thinking about at a specific time. In a few years time I can then look back and see what I was up to work wise at the time.

This said I want to improve the design, coding standards and javascript magic on the website. I feel that I can still improve the readability and aesthetic look of the website and this is what I hope to do. I also plan to post more.

Learning

The world of technology moves forward so quickly. It is important to keep up and this year I have set 3 goals to stay on top of things.

Goal 1 is to take my PHP skills up a notch. I am very good with PHP but there are still things that I am not great on. Things like SOAP, working with images and getting to grips with some of the PHP5 features are all things I could  and will work on.

Goal 2 is to further my JavaScript and Ajax skills. I know enough to use JQuery well and can edit almost any level of JS. However, I would like to write better JS and better understand AJAX. This will be the year it happens.

Goal 3 is to do with PDO, Doctrine and Security. I will be covering these in later blog posts.

Photography / Art

I have a £700 camera which is gathering dust. I have a numerous ‘unsketched’ sketch pads. 2010 will be the year I finally learn what the buttons do on my camera and take some pictures. I am looking to take a picture a day and sketch something once a week. To ensure this is achieved, an event will be added to iCal. This I hope will help fuel my creativity and pull me away from my TV and xbox in my free time.

That is about it. These goals will punt my life a few degrees to the left and push me more towards being an expert than a jack of all trades. If you would like to comment on my goals or add your own, as always, feel free.

Firstly, my problem with X Factor is the judges. I like Joe, I enjoy the X Factor TV show. However, the judges (Louis and Simon in particular) appear so up themselves its ridiculous. Each week they tell a contestant that they will be in the final. During the final they say that the contestant will be number 1 this Christmas. The arrogance of it is infuriating. This was why I purchased the RAtM single.

I don’t think that anyone should assume that they will get to number 1 and this shows what you happens when you do.

I have nothing against Joe, I think he can sing very well. I think ‘the Climb’ is bland and boring and a terrible choice for a single. Of course I am sure that there are many preteens who would disagree. Joe will almost certainly get to number 1 next week. This will have no baring on his future. If anything Simon Cowell has learnt a lesson.

As for RaTM, they are giving much of the proceeds to charity, they got to number 1 thanks to a Facebook movement. (Something never done before and something that will probably be copied for years to come.) The Facebook group made this weeks chart an event and it made people feel like they were participating in something. For no cost, a few people got together around 800,000 more people to buy a single at a specific time. Meanwhile, SyCo + Sony spent goodness knows how much money making singles, organising press events and promoting Joe’s single. Its great stuff.

Its been a fantastic week and has once again showcased the power of social media. Congrats goes to RaTM and everyone that brought the single

While many of my personal projects never see the light of day, – This is something I would like to rectify – I certainly enjoy doing them. Where client work can be stressful and limiting, personal projects can be liberating and help a developer re-find some lost inspiration.

My Personal Design Projects

I have 2 examples. This website and WordPress SOS. I own both, to be honest, for the better part of a year both sites have been somewhat inactive. I decided both needed a face lift. I located 2 old designs which I made years ago and had a race against the clock to convert them into WordPress templates. I set aside an hour for each website.

This website was sliced and erected in just under an hour. It isn’t perfect, comments especially look acceptable but under styled. I am sure that some browsers may look a little rough. This all said it was fun. I wrote the vast majority of the stylesheet without testing until the very end. Then, with minutes left, I touched up the numerous little issues. I even had a few people watching me do it which was interesting and they gave feedback throughout. A client would have never OKed this work, especially not on a live website. However, this is a personal project and I wanted to see what I could do.

WordPress SOS did not fair as well, I ran into some issues. (I lost the admin account) and the result was that the fresh install ate up about 25 minutes of my design time. The result of this is a header! More is styled but it certainly isn’t ready to be displayed. If I did this with a client site I am fairly sure I would get a slap. As a personal project though it is an interesting experiment.

My Development Project

I am a CodeIgniter developer, I have been for years. I know it pretty much inside out and I enjoy using it. However, I used it for so long that the boring parts of coding that it protects me from have become a little interesting. Things like database abstraction layers, validation classes which I haven’t written in ages interest me. As a result I have started messing around with my own framework. Will it ever be released? NO! Will it ever be used on a live site? I REALLY DOUBT IT!

However, while it is in mind a dead end project, it is also making me a better developer. I am looking more into the architecture of applications. – Something that I haven’t done in a while – I am playing around with namespaces and inheritance and seeing what I come up with. Client work would never let me do this. However, in my own time, its interesting and somewhat freeing. What I learn in this project will no doubt be used in part on future projects.

My Client Management Application

Something that I have been wanting to have for a while now is a client management application. The features of the application are as follows.

• Clients can register
• Clients can view on going projects
• Clients can request a quote
• Clients can view milestones
• Clients can download finished work at any time
• Clients have a standarized way of messaging me

While I know that there are applications around that can do this and much more. I have been unconvinced or disappointed with either what they do or the way they do it. I plan to come up with something and either release it as open source or charge a nominal one off fee.

As for what I will use to build it. I keep jumping around. First of all I was going to use CodeIgniter, then I was going to use the framework mentioned above. Now I think I will use Solar. While it is still in alpha it looks very interesting and I always enjoy playing with new tools. I will also be writing about my experience’s with Solar as I go so stayed tuned.